been very great. Catholicism, like all other religions that have approved themselves to the hearts and consciences of great bodies of men, brings with it its own distinctive virtues, and it has contributed much both to the attractive charm and to the sterling excellences of the Irish character. But it is on the whole a lower type of religion than Protestantism, and it is peculiarly unsuited to a nation struggling with great difficulties. It is exceedingly unfavourable to independence of intellect and to independence of character, which are the first conditions of national progress. It softens, but it also weakens the character, and it produces habits of thought and life not favourable to industrial activity, and extremely opposed to political freedom. In nations that are wholly Catholic, religious indifference usually in some degree corrects these evils, and the guidance of affairs passes naturally into the hands of a cultivated laity actuated by secular motives, and aiming at secular ends. But no class of men by their principles and their modes of life and of thought are less fitted for political leadership than Catholic priests. It is inevitable that they should subordinate political to sectarian considerations. It is scarcely possible that they should be sincerely attached to tolerance, intellectual activity, or political freedom. The theological habit of mind is beyond all others the most opposed to that spirit of compromise and practical good sense which is the first condition of free government; and during the last three hundred years the gradual restriction of ecclesiastical influence in politics has been one of the best measures of national progress. It may indeed be safely asserted that, under the conditions of modern life, no country will ever play a great and honourable part in the world if the policy of its rulers or the higher education of its people is subject to the control of the Catholic priesthood. In Irish history especially the dividing influence

of religious animosities is too manifest to be overlooked, and there is no doubt that the Catholicism of the bulk of the people has in more than one way largely contributed to their alienation from England. It deepens the distinctive differences of the national type. The Church as an organised body becomes the centre of the national affections, bringing in its train political sympathies, affinities, and interests wholly different from those of the great majority of Englishmen. Besides this, Catholicism, when it has once saturated with its influence the character of a nation, has a strangely antiseptic power, giving a wonderful tenacity to all old traditions, habits, prejudices, and tendencies.

But, notwithstanding all this, it would have been politically comparatively innocuous had it not been forced by oppression into antagonism to the law; had not the policy of confiscations thrown upon the priesthood the leadership of the people; had not the commercial spirit, which is the natural corrective of theological excesses, been unduly repressed. As it is, its injurious effects have been greatly exaggerated. The Act of William against 'robbers, rapparees, and tories,' shows that Protestants and reputed Protestants as well as Papists and reputed Papists were concerned even in the outrages that followed the confiscations of the Revolution;1 and in the latter half of the eighteenth century, if the outrages of the White Boys and the Rockites were perpetrated by Catholics, the outrages of the Hearts of Steel' and of the Hearts of Oak' were perpetrated by Protestants. Protestants bore a great part in the rebellion of 1798, and they must bear the chief blame of the religious riots which still disgrace the civilisation of Ulster. I have already noticed the very remarkable

17 Gul. III. c. 21. See Sigerson's Hist. of Land Tenures in Ire. land, p. 37.

fact that in the eighteenth century the middlemen and squireens, who under the operation of the penal laws were necessarily for the most part Protestants, exhibited more than perhaps any other class the worst defects of the Irish character. The many admirable qualities of modern Scotland have often been attributed almost exclusively to the Reformation; but a large part of them date only from the industrial movement that followed the union, or from the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions, in 1746. Writers who are accustomed to attribute the differences between Scotland and Ireland solely to the difference of their religion, forget some of the most salient facts in the national history. They forget that during seventy memorable years that followed the Scotch union, while Scotland enjoyed perfect free trade, and was advancing with gigantic strides in industrial prosperity, Ireland still lay under the weight of the commercial disabilities, and the most energetic classes were driven to the Continent. They forget that for nearly a century after the establishment of the Scotch Kirk the great majority of the Irish people were crushed and degraded by the Penal Code. They forget that Scotland had never known to any considerable extent that confiscation of lands which in Ireland has produced not only a division, but an antagonism of classes, and has thrown the mass of the people for political guidance into the hands of demagogues or priests.

Religious convictions during the long oppression of the eighteenth century sank deeply into the minds of the people. In the upper classes the tendencies of the time, the profligacy of public life, and the great numbers who went through a nominal conversion in order to secure an estate, or to enter a profession, gradually lowered the theological temperature; but it was otherwise with the poor. They clung to their old faith with a constancy that has never been surpassed, during genera

tions of the most galling persecution, at a time when every earthly motive urged them to abandon it, when all the attraction and influence of property and rank and professional eminence and education were arrayed against it. They voluntarily supported their priesthood with an unwearying zeal, when they were themselves sunk in the most abject poverty, when the agonies of starvation were continually before them. They had their reward. The legislator, abandoning the hopeless task of crushing a religion that was so cherished, contented himself with providing that those who held it should never rise to influence or wealth, and the penal laws were at last applied almost exclusively to this end. Conversion to Catholicism was a criminal offence, and was sometimes punished as such,' but in the darkest period of the penal laws not a few of the scattered Protestant poor lapsed into Catholicism.2 Stringent enactments had been made

In the Gentleman's Magazine for April 1748, is the following notice: Ireland. One George Williams was convicted at Wexford assizes for being perverted from the Protestant to the Popish religion, and sentenced to be out of the King's protection, his lands and tenements, goods and chattels to be forfeited to the King, and his body to remain at the King's pleasure.'

2 Thus Archbishop Boulter writes: Instead of converting those that are adults, we are daily losing several of our meaner people, who go off to Popery; ' and in another letter: 'Till we can get more churches or chapels, and more resident clergymen, instead of gaining ground of the Papists we must lose to them, as in fact we do in many places: the descendants of many of Cromwell's

officers and soldiers here being gone off to Popery.'-Boulter's Letters, i. 223; ii. 12. Great numbers of Scotch from the western islands, who could only speak Gaelic, came over after the Revolution and settled on the northern coasts of Antrim, and as the Catholic priests were the only clergy whose language they could understand, many of them in a few years lapsed to Popery. After some time an Irish-speaking Protestant clergyman was sent among them, and many were reconverted (Richardson's Hist. of the Attempts to convert the Natives of Ireland, pp. 101, 102). In 1747 we find bitter complaints from Galway that of late years several old Protestants, and the children of such, had been perverted to the Popish religion by the indefatigable assiduity, dili.

for the suppression of all religious pilgrimages, and for the destruction of every cross, picture, or inscription that could attract devotees; but notwithstanding all this,' said a contemporary observer, 'pilgrimage is continued as much as ever. When any superstitious place is defaced or demolished, the people repair to it, and seem more inclined to resort to it than formerly. They account it meritorious to resort to a practice prohibited by heretics; and if any punishment be inflicted upon them, they believe they suffer for righteousness' sake.'1

Foremost among these places of pilgrimage was the island in Lough Derg, the seat of the Purgatory of St. Patrick. Through the greater part of the Middle Ages it had attracted pilgrims from distant parts of Europe, and the legend connected with it had for many centuries sunk deeply into the popular imagination of Christendom, had been inserted in the Roman Missal of 1522, and had afterwards been made the subject of one of the dramas of Calderon. In 1632 the Lords Justices of Elizabeth destroyed the shrine, forbade the erection of any monastery on the island, and made all pilgrimages to it penal. In the Act of Anne against pilgrimages, it was singled out on account of its importance as specially obnoxious to the legislators; but in spite of every prohibition it was resorted to by thousands. Many others flocked to the hermitage of St. Finbar, on the solemn and lonely shore of Gouganebarra; to the cross said to have been erected by St. Colman on the banks of Lough Neagh; to the well of St. John in the county of Meath, which was popularly believed to be connected by a subterranean passage with the Jordan; or to some of the many less celebrated

gence, and unlimited and uncontrolled access Popish ecclesiastics had to the town and suburbs.'Hardiman's Hist. of Galway, p.

180.

1 Richardson's Folly of Pilgrimages in Ireland.